High Modernism and Strategic Paralysis

This week’s WPR column thinks about the pursuit of “strategic paralysis” in context of James Scott’s discussion of High Modernism in Seeing Like a State:

As a doctrine, network centric warfare, like other attempts to create strategic paralysis before it, springs from the same idea as High Modernist projects like Soviet collectivist agriculture: that a complex social structure, whether the social landscape or an enemy army, can be made sufficiently legible as to be subjected to easy manipulation by the state. Such schemes have consistently, and tragically, failed to appreciate the sophistication and complexity of the social systems they seek to influence. Military examples of such failure are legion, the most notable being the failure of strategic airpower in World War II to crush either the morale or industrial capacity of Germany or Japan. More recently, network-centric attacks geared at creating strategic paralysis in Iraq in 1991, Kosovo in 1999 and Lebanon in 2006 failed to have their intended effect. The critical nodes of target states and military organizations turned out not to be so critical; when Saddam could not reach his generals by phone, he sent motorcycle messengers instead.

I also think that reading FM 3-24 or Kilcullen’s Accidental Guerrilla in context of Scott’s framework can be an enormously productive intellectual exercise.